How to Encourage Your Followers to Retweet

Anyone who’s used Twitter for a few days is already familiar with the concept of retweeting. However, that doesn’t mean a follower is going to do it. If you are a Twitter marketer, you need to make it easy and convenient for your followers to retweet your messages.

Here are the best ways to get people to retweet your content:

Keep your messages short. Leave at least 14 characters for your username and the RT flag. Leave at least 20 to 30 characters of space at the end of every tweet if you want several people to retweet.

Use hashtags. You can get people to see your message who don’t normally follow you.

Be sure to include a URL. A URL makes your content more valuable than just some clever quote. Use a URL shortener to save space.

Tweet relevant content. Be interesting and clever, and have something important or valuable to say.

Ask your followers to retweet. Include the phrase Please RT at the end of the message.

Don’t use too many usernames and URLs. People are less likely to retweet tweets that have too many @names and URLs. Too many @names means less space to add your own words when you retweet, and multiple URLs dissolve the focus of the tweet: Which URL should people click? The original URL is the only one that should be included in a tweet or a retweet.

Use Retweetist to find the people who retweet most often. Follow those twitterers and provide them value (by retweeting their stuff), and they may eventually retweet your tweets, too. Just make sure that you follow the other suggestions in this list.